Things Don't Evolve &emdash; They Revolve

By James O. Castagnera

"Life is a circle." "The more things change, the more they
remain the same."

Clichés persist because they capture the truth. To wit: 80
years ago in Dayton, Tenn., the world-famous Scopes Monkey Trial took
place. During the last week of September 2005 the case of Kitzmiller
v. Dover Area School District commenced an anticipated five-week
trial in the US District Court in Harrisburg, Pa. Both cases involve
the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The criminal trial of a teacher named John T. Scopes originated in
the enactment of a statute by the Tennessee state legislature on
March 21, 1925, which forbade the teaching of Darwin's theory of
evolution of species. Instigated by the American Civil Liberties
Union, Scopes's challenge evolved into a test case of the new law.
When the ACLU procured the services of America's most famous trial
lawyer, Clarence Darrow, and the county prosecutor appointed
three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to head his
trial team, the case attracted international attention.

The Kitzmiller case is a civil suit. Its genesis is a resolution
passed in October 2004 by the defendants, the Dover Area School
District Board of Directors. The resolution requires that high school
students in the district who study evolution also be informed of the
competing "intelligent design" theory of creation. The plaintiffs are
parents who are opposed to the policy. They are backed by two civil
liberties organizations.

In January of this year, Dover school district administrators read
a statement to their high school biology students:

"The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn
about Darwin's theory of evolution. ... Because Darwin's theory is a
theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The
theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no
evidence. ... Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of
life that differs from Darwin's view. ... With respect to any theory,
students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves
discussions of the origins of life to individual students and
families. ..."

Eighty years ago, young John Scopes was convicted of violating the
Tennessee law and fined $100. But his side came off by far the best
in trial, which turned the town of Dayton into a national joke. By
the time the case came to trial, almost seven decades after the
publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, most mainstream Christian
religions had reconciled evolution with the Bible. Cynical newspaper
men, such as H.L. Mencken whose Baltimore Sun helped bankroll the
defense, made fundamentalists and their hero Bryan look like
buffoons. The Dayton town fathers came to regret the burst of
boosterism that led to their hosting the trial.

Clarence Darrow, the 68-year-old "Attorney for the Damned," had
written an essay called "Why I Am an Agnostic," in which he'd asked,
"Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a
human document?" He replied to his rhetorical question, "The origin
of the human race is not as blind a subject as it once was. Let alone
God creating Adam out of hand, from the dust of the earth, does
anyone believe that Eve was made from Adam's rib ...?"

Pundits like H.L. Mencken lampooned and even slandered William
Jennings Bryan at the time of trial. The "Great Commoner," who had
electrified farmers and laborers with his "Cross of Gold" campaign
speeches a few decades earlier, died right after the trial, probably
of exhaustion and heart failure. The damage done to his reputation in
the newspapers was immortalized in the script of a play by Jerome
Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind premiered at the
National Theatre in New York City on April 21, 1955. In 1960 Spencer
Tracy, Fredric March and Gene Kelly (playing the Darrow, Bryan and
Mencken characters, respectively) starred in the first film
rendition. (Dick York of Bewitched fame portrayed the Scopes
character.) In 1999 Jack Lemon and George C. Scott made nearly their
final film appearances as the two titanic but aging litigators in a
remake of the movie.

The highlight of Inherit is the examination of Bryan by Darrow, an
actual occurrence in the real 1925 trial. The difference is that,
while Inherit makes Bryan out to be a fool, he was a bright guy who
mostly just objected to the direction his country's mainstream
culture had taken in the "Roaring Twenties." For instance, Inherit
has Darrow's character quizzing Bryan's alter-ego about how long each
of the six days of creation might have been. "Could it have been a
25-hour day?" asks Henry Drummond, aka Clarence Darrow. When Matthew
Harrison Brady a.k.a. Bryan concedes that it could, Drummond/Darrow
presses him to concede it could have been a day that lasted ten
million years. Brady/Bryan, driven into a corner, shouts from the
witness stand, "He wants to destroy everybody's belief in the Bible,
and in God."

Here's how the exchange really went in 1925:

Q: Then, when the Bible said, for instance, "and God called the
firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second
day," that does not necessarily mean twenty-four hours?

A: I do not think it necessarily does.

Q: Do you think it does or does not?

A: I know a great many think so.

Q: What do you think?

A: I do not think it does.

Q: You think those were not literal days?

A: I do not think they were twenty-four-hour days.

Q: What do you think about it?

A: That is my opinion &emdash; I do not know that my opinion is
better on that subject than those who think it does.

Q: You do not think that ?

A: No. But I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we
believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in
6,000,000 years or in 600,000,000 years. I do not think it important
whether we believe one or the other.

In short, Bryan may have been the mainstream Christian capable of
reconciling his Bible with Darwin, while Darrow was the doctrinaire
zealot who couldn't see two sides. All the same, the "Attorney for
the Damned" would have settled for giving evolution equal time in
public school classrooms. And isn't that all that the Dover Area
School Board is asking?